Thomas Hoving Quotes

Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve.

In the world of art, as in the whole of creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives.

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.

From 1940 to the present, the art world - and particularly Los Angeles - has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance.

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

I don't know who made up this sort of greatest-hits list for artists. If one artist isn't moving forward anymore, then it's assumed another one is going to take their place. With Francis Bacon's death, a whole genre of art died.

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.

The process of art evolving is always one which has fascinated me.

One can rightly speak of an evolution in plastic art. It is of the greatest importance to note this fact, for it reveals the true way of art - the only path along which we can advance.

Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art.

We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square... the critics... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert"... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.

As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

New arts destroy the old.

The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present.

The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.

When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can't make sense of it. Then, if it's around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there's a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it.

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

The definition of art has to shift whenever an innovator appears.